10 Common Office Practical Jokes

This is just for fun and we definitely don’t condone playing practical jokes-especially not in the office. If anything, this is to help you look out for the jokes that might be played on you!

• Birthday cake: It’s your birthday and your team have brought in a lovely cake for you, complete with candles! What’s the catch? However hard you try to blow on the candles, they won’t go out. Yes, they’ve used those ‘hilarious’ relighting candles. The best way to deal with this is to point out that unless the candles are put out, no one’s getting any cake. Perhaps threaten to grass them up to the Health & Safety Officer too.  Then walk away and let them work out how to put the candles out!

• Salty sugar: The office health freak with an aversion to sugar thinks it’s a laugh to swap the sweet stuff for salt in the staff kitchen. Then when you go to make that coffee you need desperately, you end up spitting it out all over the place. What a waste of caffeine. Get back at the perpetuator by swapping her organic sparkling water from the mountains of Peru for the most calorific lemonade you can find.

• Immovable coin: Your mother always told you ‘pick up a penny for good luck’. So whenever you see one, you pick it up. The office jester has noticed this and so superglues a coin to your desk and watches in amusement as you try in vain to pick it up for however many minutes. Once you’ve caught on to what he’s done, wipe that smile off his face by speculating how amusing it would be if someone were to superglue his telephone to its handset…this is especially fun to suggest if he works in the sales or customer service department.

• “Did you get the memo?”: Your organisation is notorious for policy changes for the sake of policy changes, but even you get suspicious when you get a memo saying your lunch break has been cut down from one hour to 59 minutes as part of this year’s budget cuts. Teach the sender of the ‘memo’ a lesson by bringing back from lunch a gourmet sandwich for everyone-everyone, that is, except Mr. Funny Guy.

• Urgent documents: You come into the office and find an envelope on your desk marked ‘URGENT’. When you open it, the documents make no sense to you workwise, but instead seem to be a random collection of failed printouts from the office recycling bin. You’ve been had, but you can get back at the perpetrator by ‘forwarding’ her a ‘high priority’ email that (with the help of Google Translator or Babel Fish) is entirely in a language that she doesn’t  understand and has probably never even seen before. When she finally identifies the language and puts the email back through Babel Fish, she’ll find the message is not urgent at all but just a string of random words put together…

• Massive spider: You open the door of a room in your workplace and the first thing you see is a huge spider hanging down from the other side of the door frame. But before you panic, it’s probably fake. Get the prankster back by slipping the plastic spider into his desk drawer. When he goes to open it, he’ll be shocked to the core even though he knows it’s fake-all because he wasn’t expecting it to be there.

• Fridge logic: Something looks odd about your desk-that’s right; everything that was on it has gone missing while you’ve been away from it. Try looking in the fridge. Then get back the person who moved all your stuff there by sneaking her debit card out of her purse and hiding it. When she asks you if you’ve seen it, tell her “try looking in the freezer”. Only give it back to her once she’s running into the kitchen, on the verge of tears.

• Fridge logic II: You open the office fridge one day to find a full brown paper bag with ‘pigeon’ written on it. Dare you look in it? Of course you dare-it’s only a joke and there’s nothing but a cheese sandwich in there. Get back at the ‘comedian’ responsible by leaving a full brown paper bag on his desk marked ‘severed hands’.

• Family photos: Photos of your loved ones take pride of place on your desk. So you’re not impressed when you come back from lunch and someone’s replaced them with photos of David Hasselhoff, Freddie Starr, Rolf Harris and the cast of High School Musical. Get back at that someone by changing their screensaver to a picture of Mr. Blobby.

• “No, I’m not eight”: You’ve finally got a meeting with that important potential client. You meet her in reception, lead her up to your office and towards your desk. It’s a shame that, in the time you’ve been away from it, some joker has replaced all your stationery with SpongeBob SquarePants stationery. Try explaining that to your would-be client. The good news is you can get back at the joker later on by replacing all the reference books on his desk with Sweet Valley High books.

Even though we’ve given you some harmless ideas for getting back at practical jokers, remember not to go too far-revenge is not a good look for the workplace! If, however, you’re the targeted victim of more viscous behaviour than a couple of pranks, you might really want to take revenge. This is inadvisable for a number of reasons. The best way to deal with office bullying is to be clear with both yourself and your colleagues about what you do and don’t find acceptable. If no one listens or it becomes clear that bullying is part of office culture, it may be time to look for a new job or change career altogether before the joke goes too far.

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